The Debian project is proud to announce that this year, 16 students have been accepted into the Google Summer of Code program to work on improving Debian. This is the highest number of students accepted since Debian started participating in this program. The list of selected students and the projects they're working on is publicly available. If you are interested in one of these projects, you are encouraged to come and join the #debian-soc IRC channel, or to contact the students and their mentors directly.
Mònica Ramírez Arceda announced the result of Debian participation in the Outreach Program for Women. One of the four applicants was accepted, but also received a slot for the Google Summer of Code. As a consequence, this internship was not used. Since the Outreach Program for Women is run twice a year, Mònica has opened the discussion about further Debian participation with a call for more volunteers. Join the #debian-opw IRC channel if you are willing to help with this initiative.
Lucas Nussbaum sent his monthly report of DPL activities for May 2013. Among other things, Lucas reminded readers that it could still be possible to submit talks for DebConf13, in Vaumarcus, Switzerland, and called for the creation of a Debian trademark team, handling the trademark use requests that are being received following the publication of the Debian trademark policy. He also mentioned that discussions which occurred during the last DPL campaign have been summarised by Brian Gupta on a dedicated page of the Debian Wiki, and encouraged people to contribute to maintaining this page when ideas are raised on Debian lists.
debian-multimedia.org was a popular unofficial repository of Debian
packages. Last year, this service moved to a new domain, and despite efforts
from Debian, the debian-multimedia.org domain recently expired, and has now
been registered by someone unknown to Debian.
This is a good example of the importance of the use of cryptography to secure
APT repositories
,
DPL
Lucas Nussbaum said.
The Debian project would like to emphasise the need to consider possible
security issues when using third-party repositories and the importance of not
blindly adding keys to the APT keyring.
A Swedish municipal e-service named Fixa Min Gata
(fix my street
in English), used for reporting potholes, broken paving stones,
graffiti, non-functioning lamp posts, and other problems,
has
been reported to be powered by Debian servers.
4 applicants have been accepted as Debian Maintainers since the previous issue of the Debian Project News. Please welcome Gianfranco Costamagna, Emmanuel Bourg, Geoffrey Thomas and Prach Pongpanich into our project!
Debian's Security Team recently released advisories for these packages (among others): subversion, telepathy-gabble, wireshark, iceweasel, krb5, gnutls26, otrs2 and chromium-browser. Please read them carefully and take the proper measures.
Please note that these are a selection of the more important security advisories of the last weeks. If you need to be kept up to date about security advisories released by the Debian Security Team, please subscribe to the security mailing list (and the separate backports list, and stable updates list) for announcements.
612 packages were added to the unstable Debian archive recently. Among many others are: